Political Wisdom: Kagan and the Supreme Court

By

Mary Lu Carnevale

May 10, 2010 6:46 am ET

President Barack Obama has picked Solicitor General Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, and is to announce her nomination today. She has been a policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton and was dean of Harvard Law School, but she has never been a judge. In choosing Kagan to succeed retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, the 90-year-old leader of the court’s liberal wing, Obama appears to have placed a high value on her ability to bring together people of differing views.

As the days wound down this past week toward Kagan’s selection by President Obama, the nation could look West and East and see cultural conventions on the verge of change, much along the lines of Dylan’s title track. At the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, a Republican U.S. Senator who is a Mormon and has absolutely solid conservative credentials was dumped by his own party. In Boston, some 2,400 miles — and perhaps a world — away, the gay rights movement got a serious hearing in the Moakley U.S. Courthouse on its plea to change the nation’s legal perception of marriage.
What those events have in common, though, is that both will figure in the fight over the future of the Supreme Court that begins later this morning with the announcement of Kagan’s nomination, and both will influence, in coming months and years, the political pressures on the Court.

At Newsweek, Daniel Stone writes that “there is reason to believe Kagan will be confirmed, and quickly,” but there are a couple of potential trouble spots.

In her hearings last February to become solicitor general, the questions were relative softballs from both sides, mostly because her past didn’t contain many smudges to magnify. Having never been a jurist, the usual process of dissecting old opinions didn’t happen last time, and won’t this time either. Nor are controversial comments from past speeches (i.e. a “wise Latina”) likely to surface, as anything truly explosive probably would have been dug up by opponents during her last appointment to top government office…